This article describes three challenges encountered during a developmental evaluation and explains how these were addressed from the evaluators' perspective. The evaluation was conducted to support the implementation of a three-year educational technology leadership project funded by the Alberta provincial government. The developmental evaluation…

Making the program theory explicit is an essential first step in Theory Driven Evaluation (TDE). Once explicit, the program logic can be established making necessary links between the program theory, activities, and outcomes. Despite its importance evaluators often encounter situations where the program theory is not explicitly stated. Under such…

Professional identity is a precondition for the establishment of a profession. This examines the professional identity of program evaluators in Israel. The field of evaluation in Israel has developed differently than in most Western countries--from the ground and with minimal governmental interference--and thus it is an interesting case study. In…

While we may all agree in principle that both implementers and evaluators should be culturally sensitive and ethical as well as instrumentally effective in their work practices, we often ignore the extent to which these practice goals may conflict with one another in achieving bureaucratic competence, particularly in a multicultural society.…

Despite increasing interest in the integration of evaluative inquiry into organizational functions and culture, the availability of empirical research addressing organizational capacity building to do and use evaluation is limited. This exploratory descriptive survey of internal evaluators in Canada asked about evaluation capacity building in the…